hard to adapt siege lines for the purpose, especially in winter.
But Mike didn't think that was likely. In the end, this was more of a political than a military contest. It was now obvious that Axel Oxenstierna had bitten off more than he could chew. Even before Princess Kristina showed up in Magdeburg, the Swedish chancellor had been losing the all-important so-called 'war of public opinion.' His opponents' shrewd tactics of avoiding open clashes and positioning themselves as the bulwarks of stability and order had put him on the defensive. (Mike was quite sure that was largely Becky's doing, although she'd said nothing about it in her radio messages.)
Now that Kristina had placed the prestige of the dynasty on the side of Oxenstierna's opponents, he would be thrown completely off balance. The ability of Dresden to defy him had been the great wound in his side from the beginning, and Kristina had now torn the wound wide open. The chancellor had no choice any longer. He had to take Dresden-and quickly, so he could marshal his armies to march on Magdeburg itself. He had no options left except naked force and violence. And if that lost him still more public support, so be it. He could rule the Germanies by dictatorship, if need be.
Or so he thought, anyway. Mike had his doubts. Five years ago, yes. Oxenstierna could probably have succeeded in such a project. Today? Mike thought it was not likely at all. Not in the long run, for sure.
He didn't intend to let things get that far, though. Kristina's action had done one other thing-it had given Mike the fig leaf he needed to bring his army back into the USE. Even technically, it would now be difficult to charge him with leading a mutiny. But that really didn't matter because a civil war was never settled by lawyers. By very definition, a civil war was a state of affairs in which the rule of law had collapsed. What remained was, on one side, the field of arms; and on the other, the battle for the populace's support.
Under those conditions, Mike didn't think Baner could stay in his siege lines once Mike entered the Saxon plain and challenged him openly. He was almost certain that Oxenstierna would order him to fight in the field.
Where he might very well win, of course. On paper, at least, his army was larger than Mike's-fifteen thousand to the Third Division's nine thousand. But Mike was certain that Baner's forces had suffered a lot of attrition by now. Mercenary armies always did, especially in winter. That was disease, mostly, although desertion was always a big factor also.
The Third Division, on the other hand, hadn't suffered at all. Mike had made sure their quarters were good, with good sanitation, and he'd kept his men well-fed and well-supplied. They still lost soldiers, of course, but they replaced them with new recruits. In fact, the division was a little over-strength. His paymasters told him there were now almost ten thousand men on the active rolls. Some of those added men were specialists, of course; repairmen or supply troops of one kind or another. Part of the so-called tail rather than the teeth of an army. But at least a third of them were in combat units, especially heavy weapons units.
So, Mike figured the armies were relatively even, in purely numerical terms. In the end, it would come down to leadership. Baner was one of the Swedish army's handful of top generals-and going by the record, the Swedish army could lay claim to being the best army in Europe over the past half decade. Mike, on the other hand, was still largely-not quite-a neophyte general. He didn't begin to have Baner's experience and proven skill on the battlefield.
But he didn't intend to match that skill and experience, in the first place. The one lesson Mike had learned by now was that 'generalship' was a vacant abstraction. There was no such thing, really, in the sense that most people meant by the term-a definable and distinctive skill set, such as one might learn in school to become a doctor or an accountant or an architect.
There were many specific skills involved in leading an army, of course. And experience mattered, as it did in any line of work. But what there really was, at the heart of the matter, was simply leadership. And leadership was never defined abstractly. A man did not 'lead.' No, he led specific people with specific goals and motives to accomplish specific tasks.
In this instance, he would be leading an army of citizen soldiers intent on defending their nation's liberties and freedoms from the depredations of a mercenary army paid for by a foreign occupier. So long as Mike committed no outright blunders, he was confident he could triumph in that specific task. Baner would try to match one general against another, where Mike would be matching one army against another.
Morale would decide it, in the end. Mike was sure of that-as long as he didn't just purely screw up, at any rate. His army's morale was excellent. He'd made sure it wasn't sapped by lack of food, disease, and freezing toes, and he never failed to maintain the division's regularly-published broadsheet that kept his soldiers well- informed and motivated.
That was the other reason Mike had decided to travel by sleigh. He had one of his beloved portable printing presses on board. The devices were more dear to him than anything except his wife and children.
Live by the word, die by the word. The Swedes had already lost that battle. Mike figured the rest was bound to follow.
The Third Division started arriving in Tetschen two days after Mike left. It took the division a day and half to pass through the town. Not from the marching, but from the time it took to get every man outfitted with winter clothing that fit him properly.
Properly enough, anyway. Soldiers don't expect sartorial perfection and David had made sure to err on the side of getting boots and outfits that were too big rather than too small. A man could wear two pair of socks, if need be, and there were a number of ways to pad an oversize winter outfit with jury-rigged insulating material. A lot of soldiers specifically asked for oversized clothing, in fact.
By the time it was all over and the division was on its way up the road that followed the Elbe toward Konigstein and Saxony, David Bartley was the most popular officer in the division. Hands down.
He was especially popular with the flying artillery units. Those men had become deeply attached to their volley guns, in the battles they'd fought starting with their great victory over the French cavalry at Ahrensbok. Now that winter was here and they knew they'd be fighting in the snow, they'd been glumly certain they'd have to leave their volley guns behind and suffer the indignities of becoming wretched infantrymen.
No longer. Not with the new auxiliary ski attachments, which they were already calling Bartley rigs.
David was tickled pink, truth be told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.
On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen-and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town's matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.
Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.
Chapter 37
Osijek, the Balkans 'You look tired, Doctor,' said Janos Drugeth.
'I am in fact very tired.' Doctor Grassi wiped his face with a handkerchief. 'I've been traveling almost constantly for weeks now.'
He tucked away the handkerchief and slumped back in his chair. The chair lent itself well to that, being one of the two very plush armchairs in the small suite of rooms Janos had rented in the town's best tavern. Normally, he would have kept himself less conspicuous, but he hadn't had a choice. Osijek had been packed with refugees when he arrived. Not poor refugees, who couldn't have afforded to stay in taverns at all, but more prosperous people. By the time he arrived in the town, they'd already taken all of the cheaper housing.
He hadn't expected that. Why would a war against Persians fought in Mesopotamia produce refugees in the Balkans?
Doctor Grassi had explained it to him.
'Murad's campaign caught everyone by surprise, Baron.'
The doctor usually called Janos by that title. It was not technically correct, but Janos saw no reason to fuss over the matter. Rankings in the Austrian empire were complex, especially when it involved Hungarian nobility-and the Drugeth family was of French origin, to make things still more complicated. Janos was one of the handful of
